The Mindset Mentor - Ep 32 - Let Go of The Past & Create The Future You Desire

Episode Date: November 2, 2015

In order to create the future we desire we must first let go of the things in the past that may be holding us back. Hanging on to old memories or failures is like keeping an anchor attached to your sailboat as you sail away, you won't go anywhere. In this episode we talk about why it is so hard to let go and move on and also give three easy steps that make it easier to let go. Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

Psst, hey, do you want a free motivational e-book called Hack Your Goals, a Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving Success? Go to mwfmotivation.com and download it for free like hundreds of other people already have. Okay, now I'll get you back to the podcast. Welcome to the MWF Motivation Podcast, which I am proud to say has been rated the number one podcast in iTunes new and noteworthy in six different categories, including self-help and business, and is a

podcast designed to help you grow into the best version of yourself in 10 to 20 minutes. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we'll take a life topic, break it down, discuss it, and leave you with thoughts to impact your life and mind. My name is Rob Dial, and the podcast starts now. Welcome to the MWF Motivation Podcast. My name is Rob Dial. I'm very excited to be with you here today. And before I dive into the episode, all I ask is that if you enjoy us, if you enjoy the stuff that we put out there, that you just subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitcher, or SoundCloud, however you listen to us. And the second thing is if you get value from this episode, please share it with somebody. We're just trying to help and change the world one person at a time.

And today what we're going to be talking about is letting go. And letting go is a major key in our success. So, you know, we can't really turn the page and go on to the next page of our life if we keep reading the exact same one. And today is the 14-year anniversary of my father's death. And as you know, if you've listened to any of my episodes in the past, you probably know that I'm very open about my father, about my past, about how it affected me and, you know, how his death affected me, and how I learned to leave it in my past and not let it affect my future. And I don't want to come off as someone that acts like a professional of letting things go in that category, because I'm definitely not.

But I do want to talk about letting go because I do know that a lot of people, including myself sometimes, are held back from things that we could do just because we won't let go of certain things in the past. So I do want to talk about it because we can't have the future we desire if we keep worrying about the past. And we need to know and I need to know and you need to know that, you know, you are not your suffering. You are not your story. You are not your past. But all of those things, they may have happened to you, but they made you who you are. And so what exactly do I mean by letting go? What I mean is stopping the attachment to the past.

You know, when you release the past, when you release all of the things that happened in the past, you can start accepting the present and start creating the future. And I mean like letting go of a lot of different things, letting go of fears, you know, different types of fears, like the fear of failure, because, you know, different things that may have happened in your past. And because of past failures, we might have the fear of failure. I also mean the fear of success. And that might sound weird to you, but there's a lot of people, and I know myself included in this, that can sometimes fear success because success is an unknown. And when we fear success, we're also fearing what we know we have to do to be successful. Another fear, the fear of the

unknown. We have to leave our comfort zone in order to do something that we've never done. We must do things that, excuse me, in order to do something that we've never done. We must do things that, excuse me, in order to do something that we've never done, we must do things that we have never done. So we have to go and embrace the unknown, those types of fears. Also, what I mean by letting go is letting go of pain and anger, you know, things that have happened to you in your past, things that you have done in your past that you're still mad at yourself about. Things that other people have done to you in your past that you're still mad about. We have to learn to let go of those things.

Learn to let go of self-limiting beliefs. You know, letting failures in your past limit your beliefs of your future and possibilities. We have to let those things go. Bad memories. We have to let go of bad memories. We all have bad memories. There's different pasts that we've all had. Yours may have been better than mine. Yours may have been worse than mine. But no matter what category you're in, whether it was better than mine, whether it was the same, whether it was worse, we have to learn to let go of those

bad memories. We have to stop reliving them. And letting go of the past is something that we have to do because there is literally nothing that we can do about the past. Nothing. Not now, not tomorrow, not the next day. There is nothing that we can do. So we have to get out of our own heads and let go of the mental and physical burden that we put on ourselves and learn to be present and get present in the actual moment that's happening. And like I said, we all have different paths. You know, mine, I had an alcoholic father who died when I was 15. And there's a lot of

stories, good stories, bad stories, horrible stories in between there. And my story could have taken a turn for the worst, you know, after my father's death. Luckily for myself, thank God, I had a great mother. I had a great family to help guide me at that very moldable age, 15 years old, 14 years old, when it was still happening. Because if there wouldn't have been them there, things could have gone really bad. You know, things could have really gotten bad. Because I'm from a city which has some of the worst drug overdoses and pill addictions in the entire United States. So I know more people than I want to admit that have overdosed, that have died from drugs. And like I said, it was one of the worst areas,

but I didn't want that to be my story. You know, I knew that this world was something that I can make an impact on. So I learned to accept my father's death. It was something that happened. You know, that was the cards that I was dealt. There was nothing that I can do about the cards that I was dealt. You know, when you're playing a game of poker, you can't do anything about the cards that you have, but you can learn to play your cards the way you choose to. It's the exact same thing. I can't, you know, I can't change what happened. I can't change the fact that I had an alcoholic father, but I can learn to deal with it and then accept it and figure out how I'm going to play the rest of my life and how it's going to pan out. So what is in your past that you need to make peace with? What do you need

to learn to let go of? Did you have a boyfriend or girlfriend in the past or spouses that cheated on you or treated you wrong or talked down to you? Or did you have parent problems or teacher problems of them talking down to you or them putting their worries and their self-limiting beliefs? You know, was there addiction? Did they have addictions? Was there other people's addictions in your past? Do you have addictions? What is it? You know, we all have something that we need to let go of. We need to figure out what it is. So what is it for you? What I would recommend is to journal it, to help yourself release yourself from the burden of holding on to the past. And the problem is everybody wants

to let go of these things, but not everybody really knows how to let go. You know, some people are even afraid to let go because, you go because they're too attached to the past, even if it wasn't a happy past. And like I said, we all want to let go and we all want to learn how to. So let me give you some tips of just things I've learned, things I've read of how to let go and how to make peace with the past. So it's three very simple steps to learn to let go. So number one, the first thing is to accept it. Like I said, it happened. That's it.

You know, that person may have died. They may have cheated on you. They may have beaten you. They may have done horrible things to you, or you may have done horrible things to other people. It happened. There's nothing that can be done right now. Nothing. You can't go back into the past. So that's it. We have to learn to accept it. So stop thinking about how it could have turned out, what you could have done differently, what they could have done differently. Because at this point in time, that's a moot point. We can't go back and change it. We have to accept. So just accept what happened and you have to learn to accept it. Now, I understand this won't keep you from thinking about it sometimes, but you have to

learn to, like I like to say, have a default positive memory. So what do I mean by default positive memory? This is when I say, what is one of the happiest times of your entire life? And I give you 10 seconds to think about it. Think about it. What is one of the happiest times that comes into your life? You know, is it a vacation that you went on last year with your family? Or was it a vacation you went on as a kid? Or was it your child's first step or meeting your significant other? Or when, you know, whatever it might be, what is that default positive memory? The one that really pops in your head right away. And what do I mean by you need to have that default positive memory?

Sometimes you're going to think about whatever horrible stuff may have happened in the past. Whenever that happens, you need to completely switch off of that bad memory and switch onto your default positive memory. Whenever you're thinking of the painful memory, stop and replace them with the default positive memory. So the first thing that we have to do, we have to accept it. The past is the past. We can't change it. You can't change what happened. They can't change what happened. There's nothing that can be done. We have to learn to accept it. The second thing to do is to learn.

You know, something can be learned from everything. You know, if whatever may have happened, ask yourself, how can I not put myself in that situation again? You know, if it happens again, how can I handle it differently? How can I make sure that I, you know, don't let myself stoop to that low again or let somebody treat me like that again or let my bank account get that low again or make a stupid decision like that again? You know, there's something to be learned in every single thing that we do. So learn from these memories, these things that may have happened

in your past, mistakes you may have made, mistakes other people may have made. Learn from them so that you can learn how, if it does happen again, you might have a better response to it. You know, life is going to throw curveballs at you all the time. You need to learn to learn from every single thing that happens so that next time if it happens, whatever challenges might come, you're stronger, you're smarter, and you can deal with the situation better the next time. So step number two is to learn. Step number three is it. Move on. So it's number one, accept. Number two, learn. Number three, move on. So number three, move on. Create the rest of your story. That page that was written, your past, it's written. There's nothing

that you can do about it now, but you can write the next page. You are writing the current page. You can make it better. You can make it a success story of how you overcame what happened in the past we all have problems we all have bad memories we all know that people that have died we've all had boyfriend girlfriend spouse problems heartbreaks parent problems teachers that have you know been horrible to us self-limiting beliefs that we put on ourself. Stop reliving all the bad memories, learn from it, and move on. Don't make your, for instance, if you had a significant other in the past that cheated on you or something, don't make your current or your next significant other suffer because of issues that you may have had with the last. You know, like trust issues. People being cheated on

the past doesn't mean that the person that you're with now or the next person that you're going to be with is going to cheat on you. You know, don't let the last person make the new person or current person suffer from the last person's faults. So we need to learn to create the rest of our story the way that we want it to and in order to move on to the next page we have to flip the page and leave it in the past so a tip i'll give you on that that really helps a lot of people is to journal to journal to journal write down stuff you know if you if you can't talk to people about it i would recommend talking to people about it your best friend your significant other whoever you're closest with whatever the problems may You know, if you can't talk to people about it, I would recommend talking to people about it. Your best friend, your significant other, whoever you're closest with, whatever the problems may

have been in your past, speak with someone about it. If you can't speak with somebody, journal it, put it on paper. It will feel like you're writing, you know, to somebody else. It might help you. If that is not fixing it, get help. Go to a therapist if you have to, because the therapist will be able to help you so that you can put the past in the past and you can go ahead and create the future that you want. the last one that we were just on. We must turn the page and create the rest of all of our stories. Make it your goal to let go and to turn the page. Number one, accept it. Number two, learn from it. Number three, move on from it. So that's what I'm going to leave you with. And the last thing I'm going to leave you with, as I do every single episode, make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I really appreciate you. I appreciate you listening to this. If you like this episode, please share it with somebody else.

We're trying to change the world one person at a time. And if you want to, please subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitcher, or SoundCloud, however you listen to us. And I hope that you go out and you have an absolute amazing day. And so that is it. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you like what you hear, please share with a friend, spread the love if you think it's something they could benefit from. If you want the show notes from today, you can get it at mwfmotivation.com, which is also where you can download our free ebook, which is called Hack Your Goals, The Step-by-Step Process to Achieving Success. And if you want to keep in touch with us,

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